to esteem wheat, the vine and the olive the bounds of Attica. The
territory of scholars is yet larger. A stranger but yesterday to every
person present, I find myself already at home, for the society of
lettered men is a university which does not bound itself with the walls
of one cloister or college, but gathers in the distant and solitary
student into its strictest amity. Literary men gladly acknowledge these
ties which find for the homeless and the stranger a welcome where
least looked for. But in proportion as we are conversant with the
laws of life, we have seen the like. We are used to these surprises.
This is but one operation of a more general law. As in coming among
strange faces we find that the love of letters makes us friends, so in
strange thoughts, in the worldly habits which harden us, we find with
some surprise that learning and truth and beauty have not let us go;
that the spiritual nature is too strong for us; that those excellent
influences which men in all ages have called the _Muse_, or by
some kindred name, come in to keep us warm and true; that the face
of Nature remains irresistibly alluring. We have strayed from the
territorial monuments of Attica, but here still are wheat and olives
and the vine.
I do not now refer to that intellectual conscience which forms
itself in tender natures, and gives us many twinges for our sloth
and unfaithfulness:--the influence I speak of is of a higher strain.
Stung by this intellectual conscience, we go to measure our tasks
as scholars, and screw ourselves up to energy and fidelity, and our
sadness is suddenly overshone by a sympathy of blessing. Beauty, the
inspirer, the cheerful festal principle, the leader of gods and men,
which draws by being beautiful, and not by considerations of advantage,
comes in and puts a new face on the world. I think the peculiar
office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as
the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous
Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries and unpublished
beauties; heralds of civility, nobility, learning and wisdom; affirmers
of the one law, yet as those who should affirm it in music and dancing;
expressors themselves of that firm and cheerful temper, infinitely
removed from sadness, which reigns through the kingdoms of chemistry,
vegetation, and animal life. Every natural power exhilarates; a true
talent delights the possessor first. A celebrated musician was wont
to say, that men knew not how much more he delighted himself with
his playing than he did others; for if they knew, his hearers would
rather demand of him than give him a reward. The scholar is here to
fill others with love and courage by confirming their trust in the
love and wisdom which are at the heart of all things; to affirm noble
sentiments; to hear them wherever spoken, out of the deeps of ages, out
of the obscurities of barbarous life, and to republish them:--to untune
nobody, but to draw all men after the truth, and to keep men spiritual
and sweet.
Language can hardly exaggerate the beatitude of the intellect flowing
into the faculties. This is the power that makes the world incarnated
in man, and laying again the beams of heaven and earth, setting the
north and the south, and the stars in their places. Intellect is the
science of metes and bounds; yet it sees no bound to the eternal
proceeding of law forth into nature. All the sciences are only new
applications, each translatable into the other, of the one law which
his mind is.
This, gentlemen, is the topic on which I shall speak,--the natural
and permanent function of the Scholar, as he is no permissive or
accidental appearance, but an organic agent in nature. He is here to
be the beholder of the real; self-centred amidst the superficial; here
to revere the dominion of a serene necessity and be its pupil and
apprentice by tracing everything home to a cause; here to be sobered,
not by the cares of life, as men say, no, but by the depth of his
draughts of the cup of immortality.
One is tempted to affirm the office and attributes of the scholar
a little the more eagerly, because of a frequent perversity of the
class itself. Men are ashamed of their intellect. The men committed by
profession as well as by bias to study, the clergyman, the chemist, the
astronomer, the metaphysician, the poet, talk hard and worldly, and
share the infatuation of cities. The poet and the citizen perfectly
agree in conversation on the wise life. The poet counsels his own
son as if he were a merchant. The poet with poets betrays no amiable
weakness. They all chime in, and are as inexorable as bankers on the
subject of real life. They have no toleration for literature; art is
only a fine word for appearance in default of matter. And they sit
white over their stoves, and talk themselves hoarse over the mischief
of books and the effeminacy of book-makers. But at a single strain of
a bugle out of a grove, or at the dashing among the stones of a brook
from the hills; at the sound of some subtle word that falls from the
lips of an imaginative person, or even at the reading in solitude
of some moving image of a wise poet, this grave conclusion is blown
out of memory; the sun shines, and the worlds roll to music, and the
poet replaces all this cowardly Self-denial and God-denial of the
literary class with the conviction that to one poetic success the world
will surrender on its knees. Instantly he casts in his lot with the
pearl-diver and the diamond-merchant. Like them he will joyfully lose
days and months, and estates and credit, in the profound hope that one
restoring, all-rewarding, immense success will arrive at last, which
will give him at one bound a universal dominion. And rightly; for if
his wild prayers are granted, if he is to succeed, his achievement is
the piercing of the brass heavens of use and limitation, and letting
in a beam of the pure eternity which burns up this limbo of shadows
and chimeras in which we dwell. Yes, Nature is too strong for us; she
will not be denied; she has balsams for our hurts, and hellebores for
our insanities. She does not bandy words with us, but comes in with a
new ravishing experience and makes the old time ridiculous. Every poet
knows the unspeakable hope, and represents its audacity.
I am not disposed to magnify temporary differences, but for the
moment it appears as if in former times learning and intellectual
accomplishments had secured to the possessor greater rank and
authority. If this were only the reaction from excessive expectations
from literature, now disappointed, it were a just censure. It was
superstitious to exact too much from philosophers and the literary
class. The Sophists, the Alexandrian grammarians, the wits of Queen
Anne’s, the philosophers and diffusion-societies have not much helped
us. Granted, freely granted. Men run out of one superstition into an
opposite superstition, and practical people in America give themselves
wonderful airs. The cant of the time inquires superciliously after the
new ideas; it believes that ideas do not lead to the owning of stocks;
they are perplexing and effeminating.
Young men, I warn you against the clamors of these self-praising
frivolous activities,--against these busybodies; against irrational
labor; against chattering, meddlesome, rich and official people. If
their doing came to any good end! Action is legitimate and good;
forever be it honored! right, original, private, necessary action,
proceeding new from the heart of man, and going forth to beneficent and
as yet incalculable ends. Yes; but not a petty fingering and running, a
senseless repeating of yesterday’s fingering and running; an acceptance
of the method and frauds of other men; an overdoing and busy-ness
which pretends to the honors of action, but resembles the twitches
of St. Vitus. The action of these men I cannot respect, for they do
not respect it themselves. They were better and more respectable abed
and asleep. All the best of this class, all who have any insight or
generosity of spirit are frequently disgusted, and fain to put it
behind them.
Gentlemen, I do not wish to check your impulses to action: I would
not hinder you of one swing of your arm. I do not wish to see you
effeminate gownsmen, taking hold of the world with the tips of your
fingers, or that life should be to you as it is to many, optical, not
practical. Far otherwise: I rather wish you to experiment boldly and
give play to your energies, but not, if I could prevail with you,
in conventional ways. I should wish your energy to run in works and
emergencies growing out of your personal character. Nature will fast
enough instruct you in the occasion and the need, and will bring to
each of you the crowded hour, the great opportunity. Love, Rectitude,
everlasting Fame, will come to each of you in loneliest places with
their grand alternatives, and Honor watches to see whether you dare
seize the palms.
I have no quarrel with action, only I prefer no action to misaction,
and I reject the abusive application of the term _practical_ to
those lower activities. Let us hear no more of the practical men, or I
will tell you something of them,--this, namely, that the scholar finds
in them unlooked-for acceptance of his most paradoxical experience.
There is confession in their eyes, and if they parade their business
and public importance, it is by way of apology and palliation for not
being the students and obeyers of those diviner laws. Talk frankly with
them and you learn that you have little to tell them; that the Spirit
of the Age has been before you with influences impossible to parry
or resist. The dry-goods men, and the brokers, the lawyers and the
manufacturers are idealists, and only differ from the philosopher in
the intensity of the charge. We are all contemporaries and bones of one
body.
The shallow clamor against theoretic men comes from the weak. Able men
may sometimes affect a contempt for thought, which no able man ever
feels. For what alone in the history of this world interests all men in
proportion as they are men? What but truth, and perpetual advance in
knowledge of it, and brave obedience to it in right action? Every man
or woman who can voluntarily or involuntarily give them any insight or
suggestion on these secrets they will hearken after. The poet writes
his verse on a scrap of paper, and instantly the desire and love of all
mankind take charge of it, as if it were Holy Writ. What need has he
to cross the sill of his door? Why need he meddle with politics? His
idlest thought, his yesternight’s dream is told already in the Senate.
What the Genius whispered him at night he reported to the young men at
dawn. He rides in them, he traverses sea and land. The engineer in the
locomotive is waiting for him; the steamboat is hissing at the wharf,
and the wheels whirling to go. ’Tis wonderful, ’tis almost scandalous,
this extraordinary favoritism shown to poets. I do not mean to excuse
it. I admit the enormous partiality. It only shows that such is the
gulf between our perception and our painting, the eye is so wise, and
the hand so clumsy, that all the human race have agreed to value a man
according to his power of expression. For him arms, art, politics,
trade waited like menials, until the lord of the manor should arrive.
Even the demonstrations of nature for millenniums seem not to have
attained their end, until this interpreter arrives. “I,” said the
great-hearted Kepler, “may well wait a hundred years for a reader,
since God Almighty has waited six thousand years for an observer like
myself.”
Genius is a poor man and has no house, but see, this proud landlord who
has built the palace and furnished it so delicately, opens it to him
and beseeches him to make it honorable by entering there and eating
bread. Where is the palace in England whose tenants are not too happy
if it can make a home for Pope or Addison or Swift or Burke or Canning
or Tennyson? Or if wealth has humors and wishes to shake off the yoke
and assert itself,--oh, by all means let it try! Will it build its
fences very high, and make its Almacks too narrow for a wise man to
enter? Will it be independent? I incline to concede the isolation which
it asks, that it may learn that it is not independent but parasitical.
There could always be traced, in the most barbarous tribes, and also in
the most character-destroying civilization, some vestiges of a faith
in genius, as in the exemption of a priesthood or bards or artists
from taxes and tolls levied on other men; or in civic distinction; or
in enthusiastic homage; or in hospitalities; as if men would signify
their sense that genius and virtue should not pay money for house and
land and bread, because they have a royal right in these and in all
things,--a first mortgage that takes effect before the right of the
present proprietor. For they are the First Good, of which Plato affirms
that “all things are for its sake, and it is the cause of everything
beautiful.”
This reverence is the re-establishment of natural order; for as the
solidest rocks are made up of invisible gases, as the world is made
of thickened light and arrested electricity, so men know that ideas
are the parents of men and things; there was never anything that did
not proceed from a thought. The scholar has a deep ideal interest in
the moving show around him. He knew the motley system in its egg.
We have--have we not?--a real relation to markets and brokers and
currency and coin. “Gold and silver,” says one of the Platonists, “grow
in the earth from the celestial gods,--an effluxion from them.” The
unmentionable dollar itself has at last a high origin in moral and
metaphysical nature. Union Pacific stock is not quite private property,
but the quality and essence of the universe is in that also. Have we
less interest in ships or in shops, in manual work or in household
affairs; in any object of nature, or in any handiwork of man; in any
relation of life or custom of society? The scholar is to show, in each,
identity and connexion; he is to show its origin in the brain of man,
and its secret history and issues. He is the attorney of the world, and
can never be superfluous where so vast a variety of questions are ever
coming up to be solved, and for ages.
I proceed to say that the allusions just now made to the extent of
his duties, the manner in which every day’s events will find him in
work, may show that his place is no sinecure. The scholar, when he
comes, will be known by an energy that will animate all who see him.
The labor of ambition and avarice will appear fumbling beside his. In
the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and
by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue. In this country we are
fond of results and of short ways to them; and most in this department.
In our experiences, learning is not learned, nor is genius wise. The
name of the Scholar is taken in vain. We who should be the channel of
that unweariable Power which never sleeps, must give our diligence no
holidays. Other men are planting and building, baking and tanning,
running and sailing, heaving and carrying, each that he may peacefully
execute the fine function by which they all are helped. Shall he play,
whilst their eyes follow him from far with reverence, attributing
to him the delving in great fields of thought, and conversing with
supernatural allies? If he is not kindling his torch or collecting oil,
he will fear to go by a workshop; he will not dare to hear the music of
a saw or plane; the steam-engine will reprimand, the steam-pipe will
hiss at him; he cannot look a blacksmith in the eye; in the field he
will be shamed by mowers and reapers. The speculative man, the scholar,
is the right hero. He is brave, because he sees the omnipotence of that
which inspires him. Is there only one courage and one warfare? I cannot
manage sword and rifle; can I not therefore be brave? I thought there
were as many courages as men. Is an armed man the only hero? Is a man
only the breech of a gun or the haft of a bowie-knife? Men of thought
fail in fighting down malignity, because they wear other armor than
their own. Let them decline henceforward foreign methods and foreign
courages. Let them do that which they can do. Let them fight by their
strength, not by their weakness. It seems to me that the thoughtful man
needs no armor but this--concentration. One thing is for him settled,
that he is to come at his ends. He is not there to defend himself,
but to deliver his message; if his voice is clear, then clearly; if
husky, then huskily; if broken, he can at least scream; gag him, he can
still write it; bruise, mutilate him, cut off his hands and feet, he
can still crawl towards his object on his stumps. It is the corruption
of our generation that men value a long life, and do not esteem life
simply as a means of expressing a sentiment.
The great English patriot Algernon Sidney wrote to his father from his
prison a little before his execution: “I have ever had in my mind that
when God should cast me into such a condition as that I cannot save my
life but by doing an indecent thing he shows me the time has come when
I should resign it.” Beauty belongs to the sentiment, and is always
departing from those who depart out of that. The hero rises out of
all comparison with contemporaries and with ages of men, because he
disesteems old age, and lands, and money, and power, and will oppose
all mankind at the call of that private and perfect Right and Beauty in
which he lives.
Man is a torch borne in the wind. The ends I have hinted at made the
scholar or spiritual man indispensable to the Republic or Commonwealth
of Man. Nature could not leave herself without a seer and expounder.
But he could not see or teach without organs. The same necessity
then that would create him reappears in his splendid gifts. There is
no power in the mind but in turn becomes an instrument. The descent
of genius into talents is part of the natural order and history of
the world. The incarnation must be. We cannot eat the granite nor
drink hydrogen. They must be decompounded and recompounded into corn
and water before they can enter our flesh. There is a great deal of
spiritual energy in the universe, but it is not palpable to us until
we can make it up into man. There is plenty of air, but it is worth
nothing until by gathering it into sails we can get it into shape and
service to carry us and our cargo across the sea. Then it is paid
for by hundreds of thousands of our money. Plenty of water also, sea
full, sky full; who cares for it? But when we can get it where we want
it, and in measured portions, on a mill-wheel, or boat-paddle, we
will buy it with millions. There is plenty of wild azote and carbon
unappropriated, but it is nought till we have made it up into loaves
and soup. So we find it in higher relations. There is plenty of wild
wrath, but it steads not until we can get it racked off, shall I say?
and bottled into persons; a little pure, and not too much, to every
head. How many young geniuses we have known, and none but ourselves
will ever hear of them for want in them of a little talent!
Ah, gentlemen, I own I love talents and accomplishments; the feet
and hands of genius. As Burke said, “it is not only our duty to make
the right known, but to make it prevalent.” So I delight to see the
Godhead in distribution; to see men that can come at their ends. These
shrewd faculties belong to man. I love to see them in play, and to see
them trained: this memory carrying in its caves the pictures of all
the past, and rendering them in the instant when they can serve the
possessor;--the craft of mathematical combination, which carries a
working-plan of the heavens and of the earth in a formula. I am apt to
believe, with the Emperor Charles V., that “as many languages as a man
knows, so many times is he a man.” I like to see a man of that virtue
that no obscurity or disguise can conceal, who wins all souls to his
way of thinking. I delight in men adorned and weaponed with manlike
arts, who could alone, or with a few like them, reproduce Europe and
America, the result of our civilization.
It is excellent when the individual is ripened to that degree that
he touches both the centre and the circumference, so that he is not
only widely intelligent, but carries a council in his breast for the
emergency of to-day; and alternates the contemplation of the fact
in pure intellect, with the total conversion of the intellect into
energy; Jove, and the thunderbolt launched from his hand. Perhaps I
value power of achievement a little more because in America there
seems to be a certain indigence in this respect. I think there is no
more intellectual people than ours. They are very apprehensive and
curious. But there is a sterility of talent. These iron personalities,
such as in Greece and Italy and once in England were formed to strike
fear into kings and draw the eager service of thousands, rarely
appear. We have general intelligence, but no Cyclop arms. A very
little intellectual force makes a disproportionately great impression,
and when one observes how eagerly our people entertain and discuss
a new theory, whether home-born or imported, and how little thought
operates how great an effect, one would draw a favorable inference as
to their intellectual and spiritual tendencies. It seems as if two
or three persons coming who should add to a high spiritual aim great
constructive energy, would carry the country with them.
In making this claim of costly accomplishments for the scholar, I
chiefly wish to infer the dignity of his work by the lustre of his
appointments. He is not cheaply equipped. The universe was rifled to
furnish him. He is to forge out of coarsest ores the sharpest weapons.
But if the weapons are valued for themselves, if his talents assume
an independence, and come to work for ostentation, they cannot serve
him. It was said of an eminent Frenchman, that “he was drowned in his
talents.” The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing
with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of
character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief and
misleading; so that presently all is wrong, talent is mistaken for
genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity
for poetry, sensuality for art; and the young, coming up with innocent
hope, and looking around them at education, at the professions and
employments, at religious and literary teachers and teaching,--finding
that nothing outside corresponds to the noble order in the soul,
are confused, and become skeptical and forlorn. Hope is taken from
youth unless there be, by the grace of God, sufficient vigor in
their instinct to say, “All is wrong and human invention. I declare
anew from Heaven that truth exists new and beautiful and profitable
forevermore.” Order is heaven’s first law. These gifts, these senses,
these facilities are excellent as long as subordinated; all wasted and
mischievous when they assume to lead and not obey. What is the use of
strength or cunning or beauty, or musical voice, or birth, or breeding,
or money, to a maniac? Yet society, in which we live, is subject to
fits of frenzy; sometimes is for an age together a maniac, with birth,
breeding, beauty, cunning, strength and money. And there is but one
defence against this principle of chaos, and that is the principle of
order, or brave return at all hours to an infinite common-sense, to the
mother-wit, to the wise instinct, to the pure intellect.
When a man begins to dedicate himself to a particular function, as his
logical, or his remembering, or his oratorical, or his arithmetical
skill; the advance of his character and genius pauses; he has run to
the end of his line; seal the book; the development of that mind is
arrested. The scholar is lost in the showman. Society is babyish, and
is dazzled and deceived by the weapon, without inquiring into the cause
for which it is drawn; like boys by the drums and colors of the troops.
The objection of men of the world to what they call the morbid
intellectual tendency in our young men at present, is not a hostility
to their truth, but to this, its shortcoming, that the idealistic views
unfit their children for business in their sense, and do not qualify
them for any complete life of a better kind. They threaten the validity
of contracts, but do not prevail so far as to establish the new kingdom
which shall supersede contracts, oaths, and property. “We have seen to
weariness what you cannot do; now show us what you can and will do,”
asks the practical man, and with perfect reason.